Bruno Latour and 'individualising overlapping networks'

In his lecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, on 7th March 2012, for the conference on "Digital Societies: between Ontology and Methods", Bruno Latour took up Tarde's critique of Durkheim in the seminal 1903 debate. In his attempt to move beyond the false individual/collective self dichotomy, Latour propounds the idea that the digital makes obsolete this endlessly debated partition, which he characterises as one of the main futile worries still occupying the majority of social scientists to this day: that one should either start with the one or with the whole, as if mutually exclusive.